Blockchain Engineering
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Item Performance Improvement by Using Pipelined Execution on Hyperledger Fabric(2022-01-04) Zhou, Ence; Pi, Bingfeng; Sun, Jun; Miyamae, Takeshi; Morinaga, MasanobuThe rapid growth of proofs of concept blockchain applications leads to increasing interest in understanding and improving blockchain performance at scale. However, the lower performance of blockchain restricts its application in some fields. Our work is focused on evaluating and improving the performance of Hyperledger Fabric, which is the most popular blockchain platform for enterprises. In previous works, the major bottleneck incurred in the validation & commit (V&C) module was studied, and many performance issues arising with it were alleviated to some context. The throughput is still only 900 transactions/second in our experiment. In this paper, a comprehensive latency evaluation for the V&C module was first performed. Then, according to the analysis of the evaluation results, a pipelined execution technology was proposed to process multiple blocks in parallel. Additionally, some pipeline acceleration schemes were also proposed to further improve the performance. Our experiments indicated performance improvements of 4.38× for LevelDB and at least 2× for CouchDB. Notably, our optimizations are transparent to blockchain applications and are suitable for integrating into a future version of Fabric.Item Incentivized Research Data Sharing, Reusing and Repurposing with Blockchain Technologies(2022-01-04) Seneviratne, Oshani; Mcguinness, DeborahData is the lifeblood of many organizations. Compared to the centralized mechanisms of data sharing (and the subsequent reuse and repurposing), many, if not all, aspects of these processes can be decentralized by using blockchain and provenance semantics. By capturing metadata details at each step of the workflow, data will be easier to audit, verify, and merge with related datasets. It is common in settings where data is either sensitive or valuable (or both) to have formal data use agreements or sometimes less formal rules for reuse, which we have captured in smart contracts. A key innovative aspect of this work is the departure from the traditional natural language-based data use agreements with the aim of making these agreements more computable, resulting in enhanced usability by a broader community. We have also engineered an innovative incentive mechanism for sharing data using an ERC20 token, a popular technical standard for developing fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The system we developed can be used to track data reuse, thus providing metrics for use in measuring data producers’ impact for enterprise reward structures and research measures such as an h-index. As an example application, we discuss how this approach could radically improve the quality and the efficiency of scientific output in the setting of research data sharing. We address the challenge of the costly and time-consuming effort needed to bring an innovative idea from the bench (basic research) to the bedside (clinical level).Item Developing a Zen Click Fraud Detection Framework Using Smart Contracts(2022-01-04) Sanders, Sean; Ziarek, LukaszOver 3,739 apps on average are published per day on the Google Play store [1]. A handful of the applications contain advertisement malware referred to as malvertising. As a result, Android advertisement malware has been a growing multi-billion-dollar problem. It constantly assaults many of the major advertising libraries such as the Google, Facebook, and Amazon. This paper presents an effective strategy for countering advertising malware using dynamic and static analysis techniques and the Soot compiler framework. Our research aims to detect malvertising click fraud in Android applications using the Soot compiler framework and blockchain technology. But the approach and the framework can be used to counter mobile malware families.Item Blocked-based Solidity — a Service for Graphically Creating the Smart Contracts in Solidity Programming Language(2022-01-04) Kobusińska, Anna; Wilczynski, GrzegorzIn the last few years, we can observe a constantly increasing interest in systems and applications based on blockchain technology. Undoubtedly, this fact was significantly influenced by the introduction of the smart contracts mechanism that is one of the most popular features of blockchain nowadays and can be used across almost any industry. Smart contracts are programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. Since programming smart contracts is not trivial, this paper proposes a service that enables their creation by constructing diagrams from graphical blocks. The diagrams are then transformed into a smart contract code written in the Solidity language. The paper presents the general idea of the proposed service and selected use cases illustrating its application.Item A Serverless Distributed Ledger for Enterprises(2022-01-04) Sedlmeir, Johannes; Wagner, Tim; Djerekarov, Emil; Green, Ryan; Klepsch, Johannes; Rao, ShruthiEnterprises have been attracted by the capability of blockchains to provide a single source of truth for workloads that span companies, geographies, and clouds while retaining the independence of each party’s IT operations. However, so far production applications have remained rare, stymied by technical limitations of existing blockchain technologies and challenges with their integration into enterprises' IT systems. In this paper, we collect enterprises' requirements on distributed ledgers for data sharing and integration from a technical perspective, argue that they are not sufficiently addressed by available blockchain frameworks, and propose a novel distributed ledger design that is ``serverless'', i.e., built on cloud-native resources. We evaluate its qualitative and quantitative properties and give evidence that enterprises already heavily reliant on cloud service providers would consider such an approach acceptable, particularly if it offers ease of deployment, low transactional cost structure, and a combination of latency and scalability aligned with real-time IT application needs.Item Introduction to the Minitrack on Blockchain Engineering(2022-01-04) Chen, Hong-Mei; Sanders, George